Archive Management

Discover our Media Lifecycle Service

Overview

The Media Lifecycle Service from Sony helps you create new efficiencies and win new business based on your media assets and archives.

The capabilities of the Media Lifecycle Service have created a better business for companies including BBC Worldwide, Netflix and Hollywood Studios — let us explain how we can create opportunities for you.

Asset visibility and access

Workflow efficiencies

Monetization and supporting strategic goals

Evaluate your assets, exploit your back catalogue and find new revenue streams for emerging communities in a digital world.

Your legacy, your future

The average media company has 100,000 undigitized tapes. One in 25 has more than 1 million. Your tape archive is your history and your heritage, but it is an opportunity too.

Yet archives are often hard to access and vulnerable. In order to take advantage of those opportunities you need to make your content organised and more accessible, ready for its next potential audience.

Our unrivalled expertise in digitization, storage, distribution and monetization means that we offer an integrated service to broadcasters and media companies like you. Ask us how we help you preserve your content, identify potential revenue opportunities and enhance the value of your business.

The Media Lifecycle Service helps you answer:

How will you prioritise what to digitize, or what to restore?

What are your archives worth to you and to others?

How will you store and distribute them?

Will your content be ready for emerging platforms?

How will your next audience engage with your content?

Service capabilities

Digitize and preserve: Protect what makes you special

If your contact libraries are held in deteriorating tape collections, they become increasingly inaccessible over time. Grab the opportunity to protect your legacy and prepare it for future opportunities with our secure digitizing service.

We will help you find the most efficient and cost-effective approach. With decades of experience in media recording technology, we can restore, digitize to preserve or monetize your assets, and prepare your content to take advantage of the next generation of delivery platforms.

HD Live capabilities:

Digitization in our award-winning broadcast factory or on customer premises

Tape restoration

Metadata services

Sony helped RTP Portugal digitalise years of archive material, to become a fully tapeless company.

For a major Hollywood studio Sony reviewed and reconciled more than 60,000 assets in 90 days: 75 international broadcaster use the archive.

Using our service 156 million files are converted and delivered annually.

Store and archive: Safe, secure and accessible

Creating a digital archive that’s secure, cost effective, and provides access to the content you want at the moment you need it, is not a simple task.

The Media Lifecycle Service offers every type of storage and managed service, so you can access all your assets effectively and efficiently.

Media Lifecycle Service capabilities:

Managed archive and data centers with full control over your content

Access through cloud solutions and workflow tools

Long-term archive technologies

Sony Pictures Entertainment will archive more than 2 petabytes of video by the end of 2014 using our cloud and long-term storage.

CIV, the Vatican’s TV station, uses Sony’s digital archiving to preserve video that is among “the Vatican’s most precious assets”.

Distribute and monetize: Accessing a new world of opportunity

When you want access to new markets, we can help you create a targeted distribution strategy. Our global distribution platform offers broadcasters immediate access to thousands of distribution points around the world – giving you the abiltiy to test new channels quickly and reach new audiences efficiently.

Our fan activation services create customised digital destinations that help drive demand from customers communities so they will keep coming back, and paying, for more.

Media Lifecycle Service capabilities:

Post-production for distribution

A secure distribution platform with access to multiple end-points

Fan-base activation services

Sony digitized 1,3000 episodes of Sesame Street to create VOD business with Netflix, Amazon and Hulu.

Thanks to us, 60,000 BBC Worldwide assets have been transformed and delivered to 1,200 distribution points.

We can transact with your audience in 26 languages, 47 currencies and 66 countries.

Media Lifecycle Service

Because your content is king, protecting, preserving, and preparing content is critical for your growth.

As you can see, our heritage and expertise means we understand these vital tasks. Whatever your need, the capabilities of our Media Lifecycle Service lead the industry.

But, more than that, we understand how to help you create value from digitizing and using your legacy assets.

We help you build a business that will be more efficient today. One that is better able to meet the challenges of the future.

We want to take that journey to the future with you. Request a call from a Sony expert to find out what we can do for your business.

Customer stories

Our Content Archiving solutions have been helping customers throughout the world to better preserve and exploit their content assets.

Optical Disc Archive System adopted by Inception Digital

Optical disc-based archiving solutions will be provided by global asset management and distribution company Inception Digital to its worldwide clients.

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Video courtesy of IBC TV.

A future-proof turn key solution

Inception Digital, part of the Bonded Services Group of companies, is deploying Sony’s long-term Optical Disc Archive system throughout its offices in 7 worldwide locations in North America, Europe and Asia. The original agreement with Sony was signed at IBC 2013 in September, followed by the roll-out and transfer of its client assets onto the new platform.

Inception was looking for a next generation archiving solution, and an additional alternative to its existing tape based solutions, to ensure the long term integrity of the assets. The company’s customers include studios, producers, distributors, enterprise, government and platform owners who reply upon Inception for highly customised and scalable solutions. Inception provides an IT/IP-based infrastructure, archive and DAM solutions with multi-platform delivery certifications.

Sony's Optical Disc Archive systems turned out to be best suited to our needs as it ensures preservation of content without any of the problems and additional expense that could arise with migration.

Video footage of special moments in the lives of the Popes are among the Vatican’s most precious assets. Thanks to Sony technology these irreplaceable records will soon be safer and more easily accessible than ever.

CTV (Centro Televisivo Vaticano) is the Vatican’s own TV station, established by Pope John Paul II in 1983. The station’s crews film the activities of the Holy Father and Holy See – the central government of the Roman Catholic Church. It produces its own programmes as well as providing footage for other broadcasters around the world and keeps an extensive archive for future use.

As part of a major project to digitize the Vatican’s records, the CTV team was keen to move towards tapeless storage. After carefully evaluating the various solutions on the market, they chose to invest in Sony technology.

The Sony solution is based on an Optical Disc Archive (ODA) library to be used in conjunction with integration and workflow orchestration platform Media Backbone Conductor (MBC).

The first stage of the project involves working together with third-party suppliers to renew CTV’s master control room. Once the new systems have been installed the process to create a fully digital version of the existing video archive will begin, replacing tapes with ODA disc cartridges, each able to hold up to 1.5 terabytes of data.

Thanks to the stability and durability of ODA cartridges, the Vatican’s precious footage will be safe yet easily accessible for many years to come.

Our entire workflow will eventually be tapeless, which enables CTV to further develop a file-based exchange of historical, current and prospective CTV content.